Information architecture, web design, HTML / CSS coding, ExpressionEngine integration
Sometimes all a website needs is a freshening up. Not a major overhaul or redesign, but just a simple refresh to make things a little easier to use and a bit easier on the eyes. And that's just what the folks at Deschutes County needed for their Project Wildfire website.
The Project Wildfire website was coded with old-school tactics. Namely, tables and inline code for presentation purposes, instead of clean, streamlined code and a separation of markup and presentation. While that in and of itself wasn't a major issue, the site was lacking in solid usability and a more modern feel without ditching the color palette and content much, if at all. It was our goal, then, to take that site and turn it into a standards-based website with not only lighter code, but a variation on its theme and increased usability.
We ended up keeping the header and footer areas of the site for consistency in the overall theme. But we modified the navigation to be more user friendly and consistent. This all started though, with basic site restructuring. We broke down the site's sections and re-organized the content to make better sense. The overall layout was streamlined to support the site's content in a standard, easy-to-read format (i.e., 2 columns).
One of the areas where the previous site suffered is lower-level subpages that had no branding or navigation at all, causing a disjointed user experience at best. Our solution for that was straightforward and simple – we brought those pages into the site's structure in a much more cohesive fashion.
To top it all off, we also gave Project Wildfire staff the ability to manage the site's content on their own without having to nag the county's IT department. Since this area of the county actually runs 2 sites (Project Wildfire and FireFree, the latter which is in re-development as of this writing), and both sites needed managing, we opted for our good friend, ExpressionEngine and it's awesome Multiple Site Manager module. EE and MSM allow the Project Wildfire staff to not only manage each site's content, but to do so from one central control panel. The end result is a much cleaner, more contemporary look and feel, better usability and organization of the site's content.